When comparing Mach vs Meteor, the Slant community recommends Meteor for most people. In the question“What are the best node.js web frameworks?”Meteor is ranked 2nd while Mach is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Meteor is:

Meteor was developed with simplicity in mind, even for beginners who have just started using JavaScript frameworks. One of the reasons that beginners should start with Meteor is that Meteor is a full-stack framework, this way they can get the complete learning experience when it comes to web development (back-end and front-end development), all by using a single platform and a single language.
Furthermore, Meteor does not have complex and esoteric concepts that may be hard to grasp by a beginner, it has a clear documentation and [well-established coding conventions](https://github.com/meteor/meteor/wiki/Meteor-Style-Guide).
There's also a very useful resource for learning Meteor in the form of a book: [Discover Meteor](https://www.discovermeteor.com/), by the authors of many Meteor packages.

Pros

Pro

Streaming

Mach has some pretty cool streaming functionalities built directly into it, if your web app provides any audio/video/data streaming features, you can consider using Mach to build it.

Pro

Composability

Since Mach already is asynchronous (stateless) which means your logic is implemented by using promises (then objects); hence your functions are pretty independent and composable.

Pro

Simplicity

No complex layers between plain HTTP requests and the corresponding JS functions invoked. Which in turn means each GET/POST/PUT or any other HTTP request is directly mapped to a Javascript function. Hence leading to a huge increase in performance for your app

Pro

Robust

One of the distinguishing features of Mach is it's robustness, errors won't be terminating your complete app, instead they'll bubble up so you can handle them gracefully.

Pro

Asynchronous

Like most of the Node.js's core, Mach is an asynchronous web framework too. Each response (of a request) can simply be hooked up to a then method so that its result or the reason for failure can be retrieved after the action is complete. If you're wondering what async operations are, here's a pretty good explanation for you

Pro

Easy to learn

Meteor was developed with simplicity in mind, even for beginners who have just started using JavaScript frameworks. One of the reasons that beginners should start with Meteor is that Meteor is a full-stack framework, this way they can get the complete learning experience when it comes to web development (back-end and front-end development), all by using a single platform and a single language.

There's also a very useful resource for learning Meteor in the form of a book: Discover Meteor, by the authors of many Meteor packages.

Pro

Integrated front-end library

Meteor uses both your existing front-end library and it's own library called Blaze, which is integrated beautifully in the framework and fulfills the purpose of a true MV* front-end framework.

Pro

Full-stack reactivity

Changes in the database will be propagated to all subscribed clients in real time, without you having to write any code.

Pro

Seamless communication between client and server

Meteor is built on top of Node.js and jQuery on the client.

Meteor enables the client and server to communicate data seamlessly, in real-time. You don't have to write any REST API or pub/sub code - Meteor takes care of it all automatically for you.

Pro

Isomorphic package system

A Meteor package can supply code for both the client and the server, and for mobile (Cordova) apps. For example, an autocomplete package supplies both server code to search a collection, and client code to display the results. The mdg:camera package supports the native camera if the app is built for mobile, or the HTML getUserMedia API to take pictures from the browser.

Pro

Auto reload/refresh (hot code push)

Every time a change in the source file is saved, all connected clients will refresh automatically - browser tabs, mobile apps running in the simulator or on the physical device.

Or, deploy a Meteor app (meteor deploy myapp) and all clients, plus all mobile apps with the server set to myapp.meteor.com will automatically reload to use the code changes.

This drastically reduces the development cycle for apps in the App Store, where a regular update can wait for one to two weeks before being approved.

Pro

Popular

Meteor is the 10th most starred project on GitHub and has overtaken even Rails.

Pro

Real-time testing framework

Meteor also has an official testing framework called Velocity. Velocity enables real-time unit testing and integration with Jasmine or Mocha syntax. Tests are automatically run when code is saved and the testing result is indicated by a green or red dot in the upper right corner of the app.

Pro

Includes latency compensation

The client will mimic instant server-side response, and updates automatically if it was different once the information is available.

Pro

Built-in security

Pro

Mobile apps from the same code base

Meteor can generate mobile (iOS and Android) apps from the same codebase as the web app, using the Cordova (PhoneGap) library (which brings native device functionality to JavaScript applications).

Meteor-generated mobile apps are JavaScript, HTML and CSS bundles that run in a UIWebView (on iOS) or WebView (on Android). Apps can be run locally in the iOS/Android emulator, or on physical devices. You can also publish them to Google Play Store or Apple's App Store.

Moreover, these hybrid mobile apps benefit from hot code push, which dramatically accelerates the development cycle.

Pro

Powerful performance monitoring tools

Pro

VC-funded open-source

Bright future for Meteor - funded by venture capital and open-source.

Pro

In-app debugging

The community behind Meteor has created a useful application for debugging Meteor apps that will automatically delete collections and display client-side documents, allow you to control subscriptions and lets you modify the documents.

Meteor also has great support for server-side debugging, and WebStorm has also released full support for Meteor, including debugging capabilities.

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Cons

No cons yet!

Con

No native SEO support (no server-side rendering)

Meteor does not have support for server-side rendering of views, which is extremely helpful when it comes to SEO. However, there's a third-party server-side rendering package available for download. The Meteor team has also said that server-side rendering is on the roadmap.

Con

Officially supports only MongoDB, which is well-known to have issues with data integrity

MongoDB advertises scalability but only if you don't care about data-integrity. There are other backend options but none of them are officially supported.

Con

Requires reliable network connection

It's common for the front-end and back-end to lose sync if an internet connection is flaky. Even though the connection should be in real-time, if the connection is weak, you may lose that real-time sync. For example, in chat applications you may have to refresh the page to get the latest updated data from the server.

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